The world must not accept the jailing of Alexei Navalny

IN A DEMOCRACY the battle for power involves elections, media skirmishes and the occasional metaphorical stab in the back. In Russia it is literally a matter of life and death. To oppose President Vladimir Putin requires not only charisma and clear vision but also physical stamina and courage. Alexei Navalny possesses these qualities in abundance.

The Kremlin has tried hard to neutralise him. Prosecutors have levelled a series of trumped-up criminal charges against him. State propagandists have amplified them, and added imaginary calumnies to the mix. Last year Russia’s security services slipped him a nerve agent in a botched attempt to murder him. Mr Putin no doubt hoped that after all this Mr Navalny would be scared into permanent exile. Instead, on January 17th, five months after falling into a coma and being evacuated to Germany on a stretcher, Mr Navalny boarded a low-cost airline called Pobeda (Victory) and flew back to Moscow.

He was grabbed at the border, spirited off to a police station and put on trial there at one minute’s notice. The charge was violating parole—while lying in a German hospital, he had been unable to check into a police station in Russia. He was found guilty, of course, and sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment. He awaits a second trial scheduled for February 2nd that could see him locked up for three and a half years and possibly much longer.

Yet still he torments his tormentor. On January 19th he released a two-hour film about Mr Putin’s billion-dollar secret palace on the Black Sea, set on an estate 39 times larger than Monaco, with an underground ice-hockey rink, a casino and a red-velvet hookah lounge and dance pole. This was bought with “the biggest bribe in history”, Mr Navalny’s team claimed. (The Kremlin denies that the palace belongs to Mr Putin.) In less than a day the video had clocked up 20m views on YouTube.

Mr Navalny’s conviction has plunged Russia to a new nadir of lawlessness. In the room where he was tried, there was even a picture on the wall of the head of Stalin’s secret police. The violence unleashed by the Kremlin on its opponents is a threat not only to Mr Navalny, but also to ordinary Russians. A kleptocracy and repressive regime cannot go into reverse and requires new fodder to keep itself in power. What happens next depends largely on how the population and the elite respond. A nationwide protest called by Mr Navalny on January 23rd, ahead of his new trial, will be a critical test.

A lawless Russia is a threat to the outside world, too. Repression at home is rarely isolated from aggression abroad, as Mr Putin has repeatedly shown. His arrest of Mr Navalny, who was treated as Angela Merkel’s personal guest while he was in Germany, is a slap in the face for the German chancellor and the West. It also presents a challenge to the incoming administration of President Joe Biden who, unlike his predecessor, sees Mr Putin’s Russia as one of the biggest threats to American security.

Mr Biden’s incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, set the right tone by issuing a sharply worded demand for Mr Navalny’s release within hours of his arrest. But words are not enough. Mr Biden should lead a coalition to grapple with Russia’s corruption and its Western enablers (see article). It should impose personal sanctions not only on Mr Putin’s cronies and those responsible for poisoning and jailing Mr Navalny, but also on the much larger number of corrupt officials and politicians who have laundered or spent their ill-gotten wealth in the West in the past two decades of Mr Putin’s rule.

Mr Navalny is risking his freedom and his life to stand up to a brutal, crooked regime. Mr Putin may command an army, the security services and a nuclear arsenal. But he is still afraid of the truth. Mr Navalny’s courage has captured the world’s imagination and put the Kremlin on the defensive. He deserves support. What becomes of him matters not only to Russia—a vast, talented country captured by rapacious ex-spooks—but to the world. ■